This issue: December 26, 2011 (Vol. 17, No. 15)

EDITORIAL

The late Murray Kempton famously said that “a political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.”

Witty—but wrong. American history suggests we’re entitled to put some faith in political conventions.

In 1787, the constitutional convention that met and deliberated in Philadelphia saved the Union and produced the Constitution of the United States—described by William Gladstone as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” In ...

ARTICLES

"They’re all idiots.” It was a considered opinion, offered by a waitress at a popular northwest Iowa restaurant last week in response to my inquiry about her thoughts on the Republican presidential field. Our waitress was not a Democrat; in 2008, she caucused for Mitt Romney. And she’s interested in the current race, as she demonstrated with a succinct but sophisticated analysis of the candidates. The more she sees them, the less she likes them.

FEATURES

Last year, I happened to drive by my old high school, Woodrow Wilson in Washington, and I saw something very encouraging: The school was being demolished. Why was this encouraging? Well, the sprawling, red brick building had been standing, with little modification and not enough maintenance, since 1935. It lacked basic amenities that people who went to normal schools might take for granted, like functioning light fixtures and a supply of toilet paper. (We did have an indoor pool for a while, until one of the walls said “screw it” and collapsed.)

Books & Arts

If I thought of Dwight Macdonald every time I came across a PBS pledge drive, I would think of Dwight Macdonald much more often than I do. But I do think of him now and then, and the pledge drive is usually the occasion for it. When America stares wide-eyed as its intellectual public TV network shills for itself with doo-wop concerts and Suze Orman get-rich pep talks, we can thank Macdonald. He’s the spiritual father to the pledge drive.

A witty magazine writer who thrived from the forties through the early seventies, Macdonald was a steady contributor not only to “little magazines” like Partisan Review and Commentary but also, in a rare instance of journalistic crossdressing, to the high-paying slicks: ...

Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis has written an impressive biography of George Kennan, the Cold War strategist, Soviet expert, and intellectual icon of the liberal establishment. Well worth reading, it nonetheless raises ...

The new version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—John le Carré’s 1974 novel made into an indelible 1979 miniseries with Alec Guinness—isn’t really a piece of storytelling. It’s more of an art installation, a ...

CASUAL

Mrs. Johansen always complained. She’d whine about newsprint smearing. She’d grumble that I folded the paper wrong. Never mind that I was delivering to all her neighbors; she knew that some of them, most of them, were waiting for a chance to steal her newspaper, and she’d make me wedge the paper—folded in thirds—between her door handle and the jamb.

Which was fine on a Saturday. But who could get a fat Friday newspaper into that narrow space? So, every time I fumbled at the door, I’d hear her. Well, no, not every time. Memory is a boastful guide, at best. But often enough, she’d be up at six in the morning: a hatchet-thin woman with an angry glare and a ...